


Winifred Kirkland. 


Ln 


The Outlook,Dec.31,1919. 








THE LIBRARY OF THE 
UNIVERSITY OF 
NORTH CAROLINA 


THE COLLECTION OF 
NORTH CAROLINIANA 
ENDOWED BY 
JOHN SPRUNT HILL 
CLASS OF 1889 


ee 5 


K Sam 


To 


FOR USE ONLY IN 


THE NORTH CAROLINA COLLECTION 


Form No. A-368, Rev. 8/95 





(VY (es 


- MOUNTAIN MUSIC 


BY. WINIFRED KIRKLAND 


ern highlands I catch myself listen- 

ing to the stillness. New England 
woods can be genuinely silent, but these 
long black coves, these crests that turn sap- 
phire and green and amethyst, these amber 
thickets of giant rhododendron—these are 
always palpitant with elfin undertones that 
match their elfin colors. The southern Ap- 
palachians are not like other mountains— 
they are haunted. Always the secrecy and 
romance of some elusive melody teases to be 
interpreted. 

I well remember my first impression of 
mountain music. The young people of the 
farmhouse were giving a party. We were 
too travel-worn to attend, but from an up- 
per window we watched. At first we won- 
dered where the guests would come from, 
for no neighboring houses were to be seen, 
only the splendid solitude of Craggy bulk- 
ing high upon the western horizon, but as 
dusk drew in and stars came pricking out 
above the towering peak other sounds than 
the itinerant chime of the wood thrush 


Oe nd ever again in these South- 


_ broke through the pregnant forest quiet. 


There were plashing of horses down at the 
ford, the ring of hoofs on wet and slippery 
rocks, and then everywhere about us 
rhododendron thicket and spruce recesses 
became alive with voices subdued but 
merry—the laugh of a girl, the gibe of a 
boy as he jolted some unsteady footlog. 
Presently the cleared lawn beneath the 


tree shadows was tremulous with young 
_ forms shifty in the moonlight and moving 


to the march of old games. Yet it is not 
the sight but the sound that remains with 
me. In the great branches of pine and 
chestnut the katydids were deafening, but 
below on the lawn the voices of boys and 
girls were always soft, melodious ; never a 
raucous shout, never a shrill giggle. Man- 
ners preserved an old-world decorum here 
in the heart of the woods. Musical as a 
chant young throats sang: 

* Jolly is the miller who lives by the mill, 

The wheel goes round with a right good will, 

One hand in the hopper and one in the sack— 

Girls step forward and boys step back.” 

Idyllic as some ditty of Arcady is my 
first recollection of mountain music, and 
yet even then there was present to my ear 
something no stranger could ever fully 
fathom. On the next night of my sojourn 
my sleep was startled by sounds of savage 
contrast to that first evening. On the road 
leading past the little lumber settlement a 
quarter of a mile away mad hoofs were 
galloping to and fro, falsetto shouts rang 
sinister, and pistol shots cracked sharp 
upon the stillness, and these shrilling 
drunken boys were the same slim brown 
youths who had attended the party, whose 
rich baritones had blended with the purl- 
ing pleasantness of the mountain brooks. 
Fast enough the mountains can change 
that pleasantness of little streams to the 
snarl of a perilous torrent, and fast enough 
a smiling boy face can blacken, his voice 
grow taut with curses, and the death doom 
of his ready gun snap through the silence. 

Here in the woods human and animal 
sounds are subtly interfused. Mountain 
people can talk the language of beast and 
bird, treacherously enough sometimes, as 
when some woman or small boy squats hid- 
den in the bracken and answers the liquid 
“ bob-white ” of the quail by the female’s 
responsive love-cry, the low-whistled 
“ whoo-oo0-y, whoo-y.” Nearer and _ nearer 
comes the confident “beb-white,” although 


the bird itself remains to the end eautious 
and concealed until the last whispered 
“whoo-y” brings him to the view of a 
sure rifle. 

I sometimes wonder where cattle calls 
come from, syllables~sedulously handed 
down from one generation to the next. 
When the sheep come scuttling and scur- 
rying with sharp, hurried bleatings across 
a pasture sown with boulders gray and 
shaggy as themselves, the ery that brings 
them to the salting is “ sheep-i-nan, sheep-i- 
nan.” When the cow bells are near at hand, 
their incessant clamor subdued by enfold- 
ing tree and bush, there is no need of call- 
ing the cows home, but when these are slow 
in returning from pasturage in the long 
gold twilight, then the cattle call of the 
mountains is a cry long to be remembered. 
Some mountain woman, standing by the 
bars, suddenly straightens and_ breathes 
deep, then utters a rich yodel that rings 
and echoes far and far up the black- 
recessed coves where who knows what mys- 
terious evening herdsmen hold the cows. 
Patient, far-reaching, musical, it summons 
until the far bells reluctantly tinkle, and 
slowly come nearer and nearer; presently 
dusky horns and lumbering flanks emerge 


from deep forest gloom. While the cows. 


shamble down to the home gate, from out 
the haunted ravine rings the sweet bell- 
note of the wood thrush, chiming on and 
on, at recurrent intervals, until full dark- 
ness possesses the forest, when another 
bird begins, and the pathos of the whip- 
poorwill issues from the wood like the 
swish of an elfin flail. 

Animal life looms large in any impres- 
sion of the mountains—animal life wild 
enough to haunt a remote climb with the 
padded stealth of a bear or the crackle of 
a rattler, and arimal life tamed and ser- 
viceable, like that of the great lumber 
oxen. Down from the sawmill that chugs 
and shrills all day from a near-by gorge 
they trundle at sunset. I hear the clink- 
ing of chains before I see the sheen of 
black flanks and hear far off that most 
memorable of all mountain music, the sing- 
ing of the lumbermen—rich male voices, 
always hard to locate because they echo so 
strangely sweet from the heart of rhodo- 
dendron thicket or become muffled by the 
roar of a stream. Down past the house 
move the oxen with jingle of chains and 
pause to drink at the ford, a pool of pale 
gold framed by black green. 

The noisy portable sawmill, briefly in- 
trusive upon one ravine after another, 
makes little permanent effect upon the high 
dignity of mountain stillness. The place of 
its invasion where it has straddled some 
cataract is quickly obliterated by the 
stealthy green hands of fern and laurel, 
and its impertinent puffings and its scream- 
ing saws are subdued by the multitudinous 
murmur of the solitude. All human ac- 
tivity, all human personality, is merged 
into thag incessant low murmuring of the 
woods. No wonder that mountain people 
learn to slip noiselessly along the trails, or 
that forms shy as fauns sometimes startle 
me, looking out from leafy frame, with 
watchful wildwood eyes. People here know 
how to hide away their cabin homes as bird 
and squirrel hide their nests. Ihave heard 
the tired wail of a child from some secret 
doorway, and have wondered if the croon- 
ing heart of the mountains holds comfort- 
ing for little ones helpless before the ca- 
price of some moody mountain mother. 


Unthinkably remote as is this mountain 
life from all modernity, I once heard the 
melody of the highlands and the clatter of 
the vaudeville stage contend side by side 
for audience. The occasion was called an 
ice-cream festival, but the mildness with 
which one associates those words was not 
present here. As I sat ow the dark porch 
of the host’s shack, I looked through the 
lighted window, where on the bureau-top 
just inside lay a great murderous Colt. 
With darkling reference to its efficiency, 
the young mountaineer in charge of cere- 
monies announced that he didn’t reckon to 
have no trouble around there that evening. 
The warning and the pistol supplied that 
sinister under-note always haunting the 
subdued decorum of mountain gatherings. 
Dusky tables were lighted by smoky lamps, 
and always silently some girl would be led 
away by some long, lithe youth to a seat at 
that shadowy board—crude enough act, 
which yet there beneath the high dim crest 
of Craggy against the stars had all the 
dignity of romance. 

It was here on the porch that the two 
types of music competed; the old and 
beautiful, the new and tawdry. By all 
promptings of setting and of mood, the 
young people should have danced, but they 
dared not dance; church laws, the only | 
genuine laws of the mountains, forbade 
dancing. Such strictness is an innovation 
on freer, older practice, and it was a 
tragedy for the old fiddler, who had given 
his life to making hearts and feet light 
for dancing. His white beard swept the 
strings, his eyes burned in appeal, and he 
fiddled with a mirth and music to make 
the heart break because he could win no 
response. Young feet stirred restlessly as 
they were entreated by the very gladness 
of the redbird’s whistle, by the woven 


maze of fireflies in the pine, by the leaping 
flame of azalea against some black recess, 


but no one danced while the old man 
played his soul into the strings. Then in 
upon the elfin magic of his fiddle broke 
the ugly metallic discord of a phonograph 
set going for the evening’s entertainment. 
It poured forth its vaudeville guffaws, its 
nasal vaudeville eatches, its music-hall 
jokes. Valiantly for a while the old mu- 
sician contended against an interruption so 
alien that he could not believe it would 
prevail. Yet it did, and slowly his brave 
old bow grew faint and its jocund wiz- 
ardry died away, while the shining dance- 
lights in his eyes dimmed to a puzzled 
despair. 

Yet how soon on that evening one for- 
got the phonograph! All alien vulgarity 
the mountains have power to subdue, in- 
exorably secret. No wonder that mountain 
folk are given to long silences when they 
seem to be listening to the murmur of the 
woods rather than to the pettiness of 
neighborly chat. No wonder they translate 
that occult undertone into all manner of 
strange superstitions, propitiative to strong 
presences surmised. When the great winds 
come roaring down from the Balsam Gap, 
who shall interpret the summons of their 
trumpets? And who shall ever forget the 
sound of mountain rain? Its insistent 
downpour beats upon the brain as if that 
were but a drum that might be broken to 
serve some great thunder motif of the 
orchestra. Blare of the great wind, stealthy 
rustle of the fern, incessant roar of tum- 
bling brooks, beat, beat, beat of rain, in 
their deep diapason, all petty human voices, 
and all cries of beasts that perish, all 
sweetest fluting of all redbirds, all are 
fused and forgotten. 


Asheville, North Carolina. 
593 


THE BOOK TABLE: DEVOTED TO BOOKS AND THEIR MAKERS 


SPANISH DRAMATISTS OF TO-DAY’ 


BY ALEXANDER GREEN 


tion is to label plays according to con- 

venient types and periods is obliged 
to confess his impotence when he enters the 
uncharted sea of the present-day drama. 
This is the age of revolt, the period of ex- 
perimentation with new ideas and new 
prejudices and new forms to clothe them. 

So well have the contemporary Spanish 
dramatists followed the varying tenden- 
cies and changing methods of the time that 
there is no one definition of the past that 
could include the acknowledged master- 
pieces from José Echegaray down to Bena- 
vente. 

There is one bond of type, howeyer, that 
connects them all and sets them apart 
from the other dramatists of Europe and 
America; namely, the peculiarly Spanish 
atmosphere of their productions. Ibsen, 
with all his Scandinavian setting and 
Northern philosophy, remains a true cos- 
mopolitan. Tchekoff’s dramas of abstract 
character, for all their brooding Slavic 
atmosphere, hold out a strong appeal to all 
who appreciate the passing spectacle of 
humanity. The fact that Professor Lewi- 
sohn in his “ Modern Drama” (1915) de- 
votes no space whatever to the Spanish 
stage ; that Barrett H. Clark in his “ Con- 
tinental Drama” (1915) discusses onl 
Echegaray and Pérez Galdés; and that it 
has been practically only since 1915 that 
English translations have appeared of the 
other great Spanish dramatists, reveals a 
probable fear on the part of the translators 
that the characteristics peculiar to the 
Spanish drama would not appeal to the 
average American reader. 

And there is some reason for this appre- 
hension. Spain is in many respects still 
the land of old-fashioned romance, remi- 
niscent of the days of Lope and Calderoén. 
Headed to-day toward progress and social 
evolution, she has not yet succeeded in as- 
suring the triumph of new ideas that in 
other countries are no longer questioned. 
Political and social equality in Spain are 
still mere desiderata. Ecclesiastical domi- 
nation in politics is still a living problem 
which Pérez Galdés finds it necessary to 
challenge. The bull-ring is still popular 
enough to furnish Blasco Ibafiez, the social 
doctrinaire, with the weapons of antago- 
nistic propaganda. An aristocracy exists 
for the lashing mockery of Benavente, the 
Shaw of Spain. 

The modern Spanish theater begins with 
Echegaray and culminates in Benavente. 
The former, in his earlier years aromanticist 
on the order of Hugo, was the first modern 
to wean the Spanish theater from its trans- 
Pyrenaic influences. Between Echegara 
and Benavente stands Pérez Galdés, the 
greatest literary genius of modern Spain, 
who has combined his réle of powerful 
novelist with that of an inspired play- 
wright. ‘The younger group of dramatists, 
whose rise aptly coincides with the new 
Spain that was born of the rude political 
awakening of 1898, appeared under the 
leadership of these three men. 


Le historian of the drama whose func- 





1Contemporary Dramatists. Plays by Pérez 
Galdés, Linares Rivas, Marquina, Zamacois, Di- 
eenta, and the Alvarez Quinteros. Translated by 
Charles Alfred Turrell. Richard G. Badger, Bos- 
ton. 

Plays by Jacinto Benavente. First and Second 

ries. ‘Translated by John Garrett Underhill. 
Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York. 

694 


Joaquin Dicenta, Eduardo Marquina, 
Linares Rivas, Eduardo Zamacois (whose 
representative plays Professor ‘Turrell has 
for the first time made accessible in excel- 
lent English rendering), the Alvarez Quin- 
teros, and Martinez Sierra compose the 
new generation that has altogether out- 
grown the romantic theater of heroic sen- 
timent and tedious declamation, and has 
evolved almost to the point of a “school” 
another marked feature of the present 
Spanish stage. This is the realistic drama 


of individual life, a picture of elemental - 


forces pitted against social conventions. 
With exceptions, much of the Spanish 





JACINTO BENAVENTE 


The Spanish dramatist whose plays have been 
translated into English by John Garrett Underhill 


stage of to-day consists of “ speaking tab- 
leaux” of shrewd psychological observa- 
tions made within the range of the average 
person’s life and experiences. 

Judged by present-day standards, even 
Echegaray, with his often interminable 
rhetoric and melodramatic effects so remi- 
niscent of Scribe and Sardou, belongs 
properly to a former generation. At his 
best in “ El gran Galeoto” (of which an 
English performance was given in Boston 
as early as 1900), he has already become a 
classic, like Calderén and Ibsen and the 
Shakespeare to whom his enthusiastic 
audience compared him on the oceasion of 
the premiere of his “ Madman or Saint.” 
His return in 1905 to active politics was 
interpreted by competent observers as an 
ability on his part to read and to under- 
stand the signs of the times. 

An intense and unflagging sympathy 
with ideas of reform ‘and progress has 
kept Benito Pérez Galddés, the famous 
author of more than fifty novels, right up 
to the forefront of the modern drama. For 
sheer constancy of purpése in social and 
pelitical propaganda he is excelled only by 
the more radical Blasco Ibdiiez of the ante- 
bellum days. The greatest triumph of his 
life, “ Electra,’ which gives an incisive 
portrait of the conflict between conserva- 
tism and modern thought, drew upon itself 
the fiery indignation of the Clerical party, 


P3443 


but also the sincere homage of the people. 
Vigorous realism and_ practical common 
sense distinguish also his “ Grandfather,” | 
wherein another of the old Castilian tra-_ 
ditions—family pride—receives condign 
treatment. With the approach of old age 
—he was born in 1845—Pérez Galdés has 
become a Socialist in the sense of being a 
broad-visioned social reformer. 

His “ Celia in the Slums,” written in the 
second year of the World War, thus 
preaches an improvement of economic 
conditions. A still later play, “ Solomon 
the Rogue,” reveals the fact that the author 
hopes to see the great social change real- 
ized in the natural course of work, thrift, 
and orderly evolution. 

Jacinto Benavente is the exact antithesis 
of Pérez Galdés. In his dramas he is never 
a propagandist and but rarely a partisan. 
On the contrary, he is a dilettante, and, like 
Anatole France, interested in everything 
and disturbed at nothing. He has no thesis 
to prove, no problem to solve, and no rem- 
edy to offer. The feminine heart, the frivo- 
lous philanderer, royalty and the moneyed 
class, misjudged charity and bourgeois 
morality, and the hundred and one come- 
dies and tragedies of daily life, are just 
spoils for the author’s keenness of obser- 
vation and his genuis for irony. A true 
pedagogue, he teaches by laughter. Wit- 
ness his masterpiece, “'The Bonds of In- — 
terest,” that profound comedy of masks 
recently produced in New York, in which 
between smiles and guffaws we soberly 
recognized our own dual selves, even as 
Tartarin of the Alps discovered what : 
strange compound he was of the heroic 
Quixote and the cowardly Sancho. ie 

Benavente’s reputation as a practical 
dramatist is shown by his recent appoint- 
ment to the directorship of Spain’s great 
National Theater. Having been an actor 
and playwright, like Lope de Rueda, Shake- 
speare, and Molitre, Benavente now be- 
came a manager of his own plays, and it 
was the level-headed Benavente who some- 
where said that both Shakespeare and 
Moliére made a great deal of money as — 
managers. ahs 

Thanks to the labors of Mr. Underhill, 
whose renderings convey at once the spirit, _ 
temperament, and the style of the author, 
we now possess translations not only of 
“La Malquerida,” “The Evil Doers of 
Good,’ and “The Bonds of Interest,” 
three plays of the highest order ; but also 
of “The Governor’s Wife,’ a drama of 
peice and social bossism, “ Princess 

ebé,” a record of a serious and success- 
ful search for truth amid many artificiali- 
ties, and of “ Autumnal Roses,” the only 
piece in which Benavente approaches the 
problem play. It is to be hoped that in the 
place of mediocre curtain-raisers like “ No 
Smoking,” American readers may soon be 
made acquainted with his other plays of 
substance, such as “The Fire Dragon,” 
“The Witches’ Sabbath,” or “ La comida 
de las Fieras” (The Repast of Beasts), 
which play Martinez Sierra pronounced 
Benavente’s masterpiece. 

A younger man than Benavente, from 
whom he professes to have learned the 
prince of the drama, is Martinez 

ierra. His highest aspiration is to be a 
Spanish dramatist. Spain for him is the 
best of all possible lands, Spanish ideals 
are unexcelled, Spanish women are the 
most beautiful and the most virtuous. His 
“Springtime in Autumn” extols Spanish 
conjugal fidelity, his “ Mam4” features 












